


oh darling you’re my superconductor

by ginnystar (ginny_star)



Category: Scorpion (TV 2014)
Genre: Angst with a Happy Ending, F/F, Girls Kissing
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-06-04
Updated: 2016-06-04
Packaged: 2018-07-12 07:30:41
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,713
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7091653
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ginny_star/pseuds/ginnystar
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Her love for Paige is dangerous, she thinks, a weakness, a flaw. This mission all but proves it.</p>
<p>She doesn't realise that for Paige, Happy is just as much her lodestone as she is hers. </p>
<p>aka: paige gets hurt on a mission and happy gets emotionally constipated about it and ties herself up in knots about the whole thing</p>
            </blockquote>





	oh darling you’re my superconductor

**Author's Note:**

  * For [rories](https://archiveofourown.org/users/rories/gifts).



> What a delightful set of prompts you gave me, rories! They were lovely and wonderful and I couldn't choose between, quite frankly, _any_ of them (and in fact, I started writing little beginnings for each one before this one demanded attention). ([Here](http://northerngirlchild.tumblr.com/post/145796152596/fic-unfinished-coffee-and-love-at-a-hundred) in fact is an extra bonus not-fic excerpt that I wrote for you, because I still love the idea of a Paige-centric coffee shop AU.) It was certainly something different to what I normally write, and I certainly attempted to adopt a different writing style for this fic to what I normally do. But anyways, here is the prompt I chose to fill out. I hope you enjoy, rories. I think I ended up deviating slightly from what you requested! My bad, fam.

It happens in a split-second, a fraction of a moment that she’ll never get back; one moment Paige is whispering a hurried litany of numbers and letters into her ear, and the next she lets out a funny little gasp, like she has been --

\-- “Paige, the last three digits,” Happy presses as her fingers fly over the keyboard. Nothing. Just an odd silence broken by the rustle of fabric and the almost imperceptible tinny static she associates with their earpieces.

Nothing, and then Cabe utters a horrified oath (”Shit. Doc, I need you here _now_.”) when he finds Paige drowning in her own sticky-hot blood and Happy sees nothing but _red_  (wrath as hot and as desperate as the blood that will linger and stain the shitty plywood floor). 

-

It bleeds out from her in the ambulance, her carefully constructed rage and it leaves nothing but sheer white panic in its stead as the paramedics bark at one another. Her breathing quickens, becomes something shallow as an iron band settles itself around her chest and the world seems to swim a little at the edges of her vision. 

Toby talks her down, somewhere during her spiral of panic and fear and guilt, points out to her with infuriating logic and assured reasoning that there was no way any of them could have known or have prevented Paige from climbing that second flight of stairs. 

“She saved the day, Happy,” he says, shoulder bumping hers as they huddle outside the operating theatre. One hour, five minutes and seven seconds, Eight. Nine. “She stopped downtown LA from becoming one giant fireball.”

(Afterwards, hands gripping Paige’s as she lies on the hospital bed, deathly pale and looking as if she might never wake up again, Happy thinks that they should have let it _burn_.)

-

The minutes she spends with her knees jammed tight against the metal frame of the bed blur into hours, and no amount of pleading from Sylvester, cajoling from Toby or direct orders from Cabe can convince her to step away from her post at Paige’s side. She tracks the flutter of her lashes against her skin, the slow, steady rise and fall of her chest, and the reassuring _blip-blip_  of the monitors.

“Soon,” the doctors reassure a glowering Cabe when he starts throwing his weight around. “It’s a serious injury, but not life-threatening.”  _Not fucking soon enough_ , Happy thinks as Ralph slips into the room, eyes wide as he takes in the sight of his mother against the white of the sheets. Though he’s too big for it now really, he clambers onto Happy’s lap and slips his own hand under the one she has on Paige, and she lets herself drop her chin down onto the top of his head and _breathes_. 

“Walter says you need to take a break,” Ralph eventually says in a solemn voice as he brushes a stray lock of hair from Paige’s face. 

“Yeah?” Happy turns her head slightly to glare at the silhouette she can see watching them through the door. It ducks out of sight. “What do you think?”

“I think Walter wants me to ask you because you might punch him in the face if he does it.” She snorts and feels the tight line of her shoulders drop fractionally. Yeah, she probably would.

“Full marks, Ralph. I’m not going anywhere.” 

-

Three days after they careen into the hospital grounds in a flurry of chaos and panic, Paige opens her eyes to Ralph’s face, a too-tight grip on her fingers that doesn’t let up and Sylvester’s loud whoop of joy.

-

Paige spends the next week or so on the mend, restless and bedsore. The doctors praise her for her speedy recovery, and she grouses to Cabe that they say it like she’s got anything to do with it. The team make a point of dropping by every day, bringing with them laughter, apple pie and talk over one another as they compete to tell Paige their tales of woe. Walter takes it upon himself to _helpfully_ organise the hospital’s digital archive - though their administrators are apparently less than thankful --

\-- or so a sulky Walter informs Happy after he finds her in the garage, and ends it with one of his painfully awkward segues into the true matter at hand - her obstinate avoidance of the hospital ever since Paige’s awakening. He doesn’t admonish her for it, but he doesn’t hesitate in calling her out, on the way she has been letting her cell ping and ping and _ping_ with texts she doesn’t read and calls she won’t pick up. He tells her how worried Cabe has been about her increasingly reckless behaviour on missions (”Well... more so than usual, he means,” Walter adds with a tiny little inappropriate grin, and she can’t help but smirk back). He mentions in as offhand a manner as he can affect that Paige has been asking after her, so maybe instead of making him give daily reports she could go make them herself, you know.

He doesn’t ask why though, because he _knows_ why Happy hasn’t been yet. Sometimes looking at Walter is like looking at a god-damn mirror for Happy, and that’s never been a one-way thing.

-

(What Walter knows is this -

Happy almost _lost_ her, just like she loses every single thing in her life, and it’s all she can do not to jitter apart at the seams knowing how much she’s let Paige _matter_  to her.)

-

On the day of Paige’s discharge, Happy picks up a wrench and lets the hours while away as she stares at the gutted engine that she should be working on. 

Eventually though, she comes to when it’s tugged out from her unresisting fingers, and when she looks up, it’s into Paige’s wide, concerned eyes. She can feel it happen; the exact moment her heart simultaneously leaps into her throat and drops low in her stomach. Paige carefully sets her wrench down on her station and perches herself gingerly on the edge of it - and Happy doesn’t miss her little hiss as she relieves the pressure off her stitches. They watch each other for a long moment, until Paige seems to feel compelled to break the silence.

“Morning Happy.”

Two words. Just like that, Happy’s resolve falters. She wants badly (so badly) to pull Paige towards her, to card her fingers through her hair, slant her mouth over hers, and kiss her senseless and never let her go again because _don’t you ever scare me like that again_  and _i love you i love you i love you_. She wants to scream at her _you tried to **leave** me_ and _why do you have a death wish_. 

Over Paige’s shoulder, she can see the rest of them hovering by the doorway, concern and apprehension bubbling over in equal measure. They’re waiting, she knows, for a sign that things are as they were.

Happy picks up the wrench again, bends over the parts that she is working on with fresh determination.

“Hi. You’re in my light.”

-

They fall into an uneasy routine, delicate and fragile like spun-sugar.

Cabe brings cases into the garage in need of their expertise, urgent and often with hundreds (thousands) of lives at stake. They accept and they complete their missions, because of course they do, they’re Scorpion. They’re heroes.

Here’s what changes - Happy volunteers to help with Walter, with Toby, with their contractors; anyone but Paige. Sylvester walks into the garage one morning to find Walter and Happy shouting each other down in regards to Happy’s attitude.

“-and what were you _thinking_ , trying to go off on your own? You knew what was at stake-”

“-absolute asshole, and it’s not like you can tell me what to-”

“-here, you _knew_ that Paige needed to go be a distraction and if you would just go and do your actual job, Sly talk some god-damn sense into her-”

“-do and it’s like you want her to die the way you keep putting her in danger you know she can’t go through that again, Sylvester back me up-”

Sylvester throws his hands up as he retreats, stammering his refusal to take sides. 

-

There is a split-second in the mornings when Happy forgets that she’s mad. Cocooned in the warmth of their bed, wrapped in rich sheets and satin-soft skin, she will nuzzle into the heat of her, let her fingers wander - until Paige makes a barely audible moan in the back of her throat, and Happy will snatch her hands away as if burned and slip out of bed in silent rebuke.

(They go into the garage, they save lives. 

They go home, they make dinner, and at night they climb into bed.

They wake up, the cycle begins again.)

In the dark of the night with a thousand things left unsaid, an inch of distance might as well be a mile. Weeks pass and Happy still can’t let herself touch Paige intimately, can’t see the healing cuts and bruises without seeing her own failure and her own fears.

It’s selfish she knows, and wrong to blame Paige, knows without Toby telling her that it’s displacement. She _knows_ this, but lashes out anyway.

-

It goes on like this --

\-- until one evening, it doesn’t. Paige has never shied away from Happy before - not even when her usefulness had been dismissed by her in a greasy downtown diner so long ago, like so many others in her past have dismissed her.

“This has to stop. Happy, you don’t get to be mad at me for getting hurt, not when you all do the same all the time. All this avoidance crap that you’ve been pulling, keeping me off missions, blowing hot and cold with me? It’s - it’s _wrong_.” Paige’s voice is filled with steely determination, and Happy can barely breathe. The air feels like it’s too _thick_ , like it’s weighing her down and stopping her from doing what she really wants, which is to bolt out the door and maybe never come back. 

“You’ve barely managed to look me in the eye since the vault mission, you're acting like you’ve already got one foot out of the door, and you won’t - we haven’t-” 

_I can’t,_ Happy can’t help but think. _I’ll break. You’ll break. Everything I touch breaks._

“Ralph knows something is wrong. It’s one thing if you were just hurting me, but Ralph? _Dammit_ , don’t you even have the decency to look at me?” 

“You don’t get to bring Ralph into this,” Happy spits, practically flying off the couch to pace their living room, and that’s it - the words come out in a torrent. “You don’t get to _use_ him to guilt me into apologising, okay? Maybe you should have thought about him when you decided to do a  _stupid_ thing like running into danger when you knew help was coming. Maybe you should have thought about Ralph losing his mom because she wanted to play fucking _hero_ , and I’d be left here to pick up the pieces. Or maybe you should have just thought about the fact that if you die, that’s _it_ for me. If I lose you, I’m not sticking around. I can’t. _I can’t_.” Her rant is met with silence, one that stretches on and on and on, and god, it just makes her more angry, because what, she forces her to tell her what she really feels and now she’s got nothing to say?

Happy turns to look at her, really _look_ at Paige, and whatever diatribe she wants to throw at her crumbles into ash in her mouth when she sees the look on Paige’s face. The feeling of breathlessness returns full force - as does the urge to flee, because Paige gets it. She gets what Happy is skirting around; what her sharp accusations hide.

(She’s never liked being so easy to read.)

"Stop. Happy, I love you. I’m not going anywhere. No matter what, I’m not going anywhere, okay? _I love you_. I love you and I’m not about to end this. Us. We can’t live like we’re scared of tomorrow, and I’d rather spend a day _with_ you than a lifetime without you.” Paige places gentle hands against her face, and Happy can’t help the downward twitch of her mouth, or the automatic way her hands come up to cover hers. “I know what it sounds like, coming from me, I know it’s cheesy and cliché but you need to hear it. So hear it, hear _me_.”

Happy doesn’t want to hear any more though, can’t hear any more without having to fight the sob that threatens to escape or the way her eyes well, so she pulls Paige flush against her, swallows her gasp of surprise and settles her hands on her hips.

Oh, she’s _missed_ this, the feel of Paige warm and pliant against her, the cinnamon-sweet tang of her skin, the way her spine arches beneath her palms when she runs them up her back, and she backs her into their bedroom, lets Paige feel the mattress nudge against the back of her knees. 

Paige is eager and _alive;_  she moans when Happy cups her breast, nips at her when she pulls away to tug at her shirt - and she doesn’t let her pause when Happy’s fingers brush the gauze around her abdomen. 

“Hey no, don’t stop. It wasn’t ever your fault, Happy. I’m alive. _I’m alive_ and I want you to make love to me.” She continues to whisper absolution into her hair, and Happy lets it wash over her, lets herself believe it.

When she trails her hands downdown _down_ , she finds her hot and ready and _wet_ , and it’s, _god_ it’s nothing like their first time (fear and exhilaration coursing through their veins), it’s sweet, familiar in a way Happy loves, and when she curls her fingers into Paige and brings her to orgasm again and again (and again), it feels a little bit like coming home.

It might even be true.

-

Later, Happy folds herself around her, sandwiches Paige between her and the mattress and she wishes against all rationale that she could sink into all the creases and crevices of her being, like armour against the world. 

Paige lifts one of Happy’s hands to her face and brushes feather-light kisses on her knuckles. Happy lets her, sleepily watches over her shoulder as she paints her affection across her hands in smudgy lipstick. She likes that, she thinks. ‘Paige was here,’ in ruby reds and glossy pinks.

Paige is working herself to say something. Just like Paige can read her prevarications like an open book, Happy can hers too, and she tells her so, nuzzling into her shoulder as she does. She’s missed this too.

“You know me too well,” Paige murmurs, smile evident in her voice. And she does, Happy knows what she wants from her. She wants her to root herself in something - in them. She wants to be a reason for Happy to stay. Happy feels like she’s teetering on the edge of some metaphorical precipice, but right here, right now, it doesn’t seem as terrifying a drop as it has been before.

(She jumps.)

“I’ll stay. Or, you know. I’ll try.” Paige starts in surprise, and turns in Happy’s arms until they are face to face. Happy can’t help it, doesn’t bother to hide the smile that tugs at the corner of her mouth. “You’ve heard Walter talk about me, Sly’s stories, Toby’s jokes. You know that first sign things are shaky, I hit the road. Seeing you bleeding out, thinking that we wouldn’t ever have _this_ again... I took it out on you. I shouldn’t have, and I’m sorry. I’ll always be looking for an exit strategy, that’s just who I am, it’s what I’ve always done. But you said so yourself tonight - you’re not going anywhere, right? I... I can’t promise you forever but I can promise you that I’ll try.” 

It’s no love song, it isn’t epic poetry and it isn’t even the apology she deserves, but that slow, lovely smile that lights up Paige’s face like the dawn that feathers out pink and hopeful across the sky makes Happy feel like she’s done something impossible and amazing.

**Author's Note:**

> (A few things in case they weren't obvious from the fic. Paige's injuries, while serious, weren't as bad as Happy builds them up to be, but it _is_ the pivotal event on which Happy is forced to face her fears - about where her relationship with Paige is going, how it's carved a hole into her life and taken up residence, and how she thinks it'll inevitably be taken away from her. In her mind (coloured by panic and the belief that Paige will probably one day wake up and realise she can do better than Happy), this is grounds enough to begin pushing Paige away. You can't get hurt if you do the hurting first, etc. So there you have it? I'm not entirely satisfied with it myself, and I don't know if that needed explaining, and I hate that I feel like I have to explain but I don't know if that's because I'm viewing it from the author's point of view.)


End file.
